May 23, 2007

I hate being exploited because of ignorance. Ever since Microsoft released their nasty pop-down menu bar in Internet Explorer I’ve been seeing more and more sites trying to take advantage of my ignorance for a click somewhere because of a software glitch. …Do you think that might have already happened to you? Read on.

More and more sites have been exploiting users by taking advantage of IE’s pop-down bar which moves the page down causing the user to click in an unintended area, somewhere they weren’t trying to click.

Here’s an example from my life on-line. Checkout the picture below and look under the banner ad in the middle…Ops, my cheap blog service doesn’t host decent sized images. Well, the link there says, “Downloads start in 10 seconds! Otherwise, click here.” That’s when Internet Exploders annoying pop-down menu moves the page down, instead of clicking on the “click here” link you’re going to hit the ad. And BAM, the lame site gets a nickle for the ad click. …Sometimes they get more then a nickle.

Someone made a nickle on me tonight because of a software glitch I didn’t know about, and I’m pissed. WTF are those gerbils at Microsoft thinking!?!

May 23, 2007

Did you know every Windows Mobile Smartphone has a dynamic public IP address? I was reading the other day about how we’re quickly running out of IP addresses. What I read again and again claimed cell phones in Europe and Asia had a lot to do with this. I wasn’t really worried about this because the new IP standards IPv6 gives us plenty new numbers. But this got me curious and a quick Google later I realized something I should have already known. Smartphone’s have public IP addresses. Checking my Q I realized the IP address was public and dynamic. I would have preferred a static number, but I still thought that was fantastic.

Just in case you don’t know about IP addresses I’ll give you a quick primer. IP addresses are like phone numbers on the most common kind of computer networks. Some numbers are private; those can’t be accessed from any PCs that aren’t on the same private network (typically this is how computers are networked at home and in the office). Having a private IP address is nice because people can’t access your PC. In all too familiar twist, that’s also why they’re lousy. Sometimes you might want to give someone your IP address, just like you randomly might want to give someone your phone number.

So, there are two kinds of public IP addresses; Dynamic and Static. The dynamic kind change seemingly at random, the static ones never change. Cell phones use the dynamic kind. That’s a little lame because if you give someone you’re IP address (think phone number) your number might change before they use it. Well, geeks already thought about this a long time ago. They wrote software that update DNS servers whenever your number changes. DNS servers are the magic boxes that map all the URLs like www.google.com to IP addresses. Today there are plenty of sites like www.DynDNS.org that map your dynamic public IP address to a domain name for free.

In other words, http://yourphone.dyndns.org could point to your phone. You could simply give anyone that URL and they could access anything you wanted to expose from your phone. For a guy like me, who uses his phone like an iPod, this is nice. This means I can just tell people to hit my URL whenever they want to download a song I have. …Is this illegal? I hope not, I pay for my music on URGE. …Let’s just say this is hypothetical to be safe.

Another nifty feature is that people browsing the site running on my Smartphone could see photos instantly the moment I took them with my phone’s camera. My blog could also be served up directly from my phone with new posts the moment inspiration struck. All sorts of other nifty things like that.

…The only down side is that I have a CDMA phone that doesn’t support phone and internet access at the same time — My phone goes to voicemail while I’m online. GSM phones don’t have this problem. Maybe I’ll end up with one of those.

So, I think I’m way ahead of the curve here. But I want to help push it along. There wasn’t an easy way to use DynDNS from my Smartphone, so I wrote this program. It maps your Smartphone’s IP directly to a URL (like http://myphone.com) quickly and painlessly. It’ll be posted here eventually, I also wrote a small web-server for Smartphones and I want to release them at the same time. Here’s some screenshots (with fake numbers). You’ll have to excuse my language. This won’t be the release version’s title. A few problems had me cursing at the program while I was coding it, one of those names just stuck.

May 23, 2007

”It is kind of neat looking through the microscope and realizing you are looking at something that is responsible for so many deaths”– Darwyn Kobasa

All I can say is that are some really, really scary people out there. I ran into this article on Google’s news feed, “Researchers bring 1918 flu virus back to life” The quote above comes directly from the article mentioned.

Why hasn’t anyone has demanded this guy be removed from the project? He said something that might be OK to think, but is clearly asinine to say. I don’t care if it was a mistake. Let’s error on the safe side and put someone less careless in there.

This virus killed 50-100 MILLION people in 18 months flat, that was 5% of the world. It was contained safely and then we gave it to this Darwyn Kobasa guy who thinks it’s neat looking. …Am I the only one who has a problem with this?

I realize it’s important that we know how this virus works, but who in their right mind would let this idiot play with it?

People constantly talk shit about my generation, and most the time they’re right. GenX is a lot of things, but here’s one thing we’re not: We’re not going to give a smart psycho something this deadly. Why? We’ve seen movies.

May 19, 2007

Somehow I just knew fade would bring that freeloading Nessie back to me (never give the Loch Ness monster a damn dime). There I was, minding my own damn business, driving to Spokane, Washington. I’m in the middle of nowhere, driving along when all the sudden I look to the left and do you know what I see!?! Yep, that’s right – The Loch Ness Monster. Check it out…

This was the first picture I snapped as I rolled past Nessie…

Then I realized I needed to turn around and take a few more pics…

Clearly you can see the Loch Ness monster basking in the sunset…

And again, Nessie near the observation deck. …What an attention whore.

May 15, 2007

The Ape Caves are the third largest lava tube in the contiguous United States. The cave is located near Ape Canyon on Mount St. Helens, where in 1924 miners were attacked by ape like creatures. That’s how the cave and canyon earned their names. Recently one of the miners, now on his deathbed, confessed it was a hoax. But since no-one else backed him up so I say the jury is still out. The cave’s name and folklore add to the mysterious sensation of being surrounded by darkness and silence, miles under the ground. As a kid I always enjoyed this place and so one fine day I decided to take my little siblings up to the caves to do some exploring. So, these are our pics…

Mount St. Helens…

Swift reservoir (I made some good memories on that island on the left there when I was a kid)…

Nequeshe was happy to get out of the car…

This is the mouth of the Ape Caves….

My brother Richard and Nequeshe in the cave…

Eventually we reached the end of the cave. And there, the floor of the cave under a concave wall, my lantern caught some torn pants (if you watched the video you know what I mean). Then, in the shot below, we ran into a pile of rocks and dirt. Well, did my best to convince my siblings the two were connected.

I know this picture is lousy, but it’s all I have of us crawling. I enhanced it, but it’s still almost unrecognizable…

In the pic below I’m trying my hardest not to smile, my scary story was working…

After crawling for about 50ft the cave opened up and we could rest a bit.

Then it got really tiny again, but we made it past this…

And then it got really, really. This is as far as we got. Richard probably could have gone a little further, but we were staying together and playing it safe. So we call it a day.

Oh, and we shot some videos with my digital camera. They’re really low res, but here they are…

At the end of the cave…

…And crawling back…

The whole cave is about 13,000ft long, and maybe 5-100ft deep. It takes about two hours to walk from one end to the other. It’s always 45 degrees cold in the cave, so for us it was a much appreciated two hour break from a hot spring day.

May 14, 2007

Well, I never thought it’d happen but Richard is 14. …I thought he’d have punched his ticket dirt-biking or falling into creeks by now, guess I was wrong. It’s really odd watching my little siblings grow up. They’re starting to look like adults, and they already act like they’re equal with adults. …But I don’t think they have any idea how difficult it actually is being an adult. …And I can’t wait to see the look on their faces when they find out.

I remember the first time I realized adults didn’t have the easy life. I think I was about 9, my dad was getting ready for work and on his way out the door he said, “Brian, I don’t want to go to work today.” I said, “Well then don’t dad!” And he said, “Son, when you’re an adult male you have to go to work every day.” …I paused in horror, and then replied, “Dad, that sucks.”

It sortof concerns me that Richard and Nequeshe don’t seem to get this yet. …Oh well, between the economy, war and my career I have enough to worry about.